by Ava Barry
My grandmother was the one who introduced me to Theo’s story, and she had always warned me not to visit Windhall. After her death, however, I started driving out there to see it for myself. From listening to her stories, I had imagined the walls crumbling from years of untended wild roses, the garden like some terrible, savage thing. There would be broken glass and signs of vandalism, the silk organza curtains gone ragged in the desert air.
The first time I went to see Windhall, I saw that my imagination had been wildly off-base. Not a rotting shell of a house, nor a decaying bramble of thorns. The main house still stood over everything like an aging monarch, resilient yet faded, the windows unbroken and the paths quiet and undisturbed by uninvited guests. The driveway wound up through the gardens and decaying terraces, weaving past the gardener’s hut. The cracked tennis court lay on the right, faded and overgrown from disuse. The empty swimming pool came next, guarded by a clutch of old pool chairs.
In some ways, it looked like a kingdom left undisturbed for three hundred years. One might enter the house and find the guards still clad in their brocaded vests, nodding off against stone pedestals. I pictured children in diamond garters and woven braids, playing with polished stones in the garden.
It wasn’t until my third visit to the property that I actually sneaked inside Windhall, and instantly, I wished I hadn’t. There was a sense about the house, and even for all my dexterity with words, I couldn’t name that feeling until a few days later. I had been sneaking into buildings for years, but none of the other abandoned structures had felt quite so occupied. In a way, it was as though Theo had never left.
“You still there?” Mad’s voice brought me out of my reverie.
“Yes,” I said, thinking quickly. “Where are you right now?”
“Home. What’s up?”
“I’m coming over,” I said. “I have to see it. We have to go to Windhall, tonight. There’s no telling what might happen the next time someone breaks in.”
* * *
Gran had been an actress herself, and even though she stopped acting once she had children, she never forgot that world. She’d even worked on one of Theo’s films, playing a young shopgirl without any lines, but she said that Theo treated everyone on his set like equals.
The stories about Theo weren’t the only stories she liked to tell. I grew up on tales of the aristocrats and royals who fled to America and ended up penniless, begging for work in the film industry. There were stories about actresses hanging out in full costume jewelry, drinking milkshakes at a soda fountain on Vine Street. In those days, you could climb on a trolley headed for Sunset Boulevard and find yourself in the company of pirates, kings and queens in thick furs, and young Swiss children in full Alpine garb.
In all of Gran’s stories, Los Angeles was a faded city built on the edge of a desert, once filled with beautiful women but now overrun with ghosts. I pictured smoky corridors and doors hanging open, women with sad eyes lingering at the bar until last call. I longed for the days when young starlets filled swimming pools with champagne, then stripped off their silk robes and waded in up to their elbows.
For years, I had dreams about the parties at Windhall, strolling through the grounds, perhaps lobbing a tennis ball across the decaying tennis net. In some of my dreams, Theo came out to greet me himself; in others, blind faces came toward me, folding in succession, and then dozens of hands, like the detached limbs of some Cocteau nightmare.
Theo’s neighborhood was quiet when we arrived. Windhall’s main gate opened onto Sweet Briar Lane, but since the parking nazis in Beverly Hills were especially vicious, we parked off Benedict Canyon, then walked toward the fire trail where this new dead girl had been discovered.
We were quiet as we made our way through the underbrush to the lookout point. Once, we had to stoop to get under a cat’s cradle tangle of “Do Not Cross” police tape. Since the fire trail was still officially a crime scene, there was a chance that we might encounter police, but I doubted it.
Madeleine broke the silence first. “Are you going to write about this for the Lens?”
“It’s not really my genre,” I said. “Dead girls are probably Brian’s specialty.”
“Your Jenner-Foster story wasn’t really genre-specific.”
“That was the article of a lifetime. I made an exception.”
“What about this?” she said, stooping to get under a diagonal section of tape. “You’ve always been obsessed with Theo. What if he’s back?”
“He’s not,” I assured her. “It’s a copycat crime, I guarantee it.”
I was cranky that the murder had happened on the trail, because up until that point, it had been a nice little secret. Finding the trail had been a lucky break, something I had come across on my third or fourth visit to Windhall. The fact that the trail had stayed under the radar for so long was almost too good to be true: Windhall was in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in Los Angeles, a zip code that had once been home to Jack Warner, Harold Lloyd, Valentino, and Mary Pickford. Every time I walked along the fire trail, I felt a little bit like a peasant slipping through the palace gardens.
Even though the fire trail was technically a public easement, it was so small that it was almost off the map. Unlike Elysian Park or Runyon Canyon, runners who spent their mornings here were usually locals, and most of the time, I had the trail to myself. Since I found Los Angeles runners to be lower on the food chain than gelatinous invertebrates, the lack of joggers worked out nicely for me.
The discovery of the art student’s dead body two days before changed everything. Overnight, pictures of the trail and the surrounding neighborhood were all over the news, and suddenly my trail was blocked off by TV crews, police officers, and plainclothes cops turning over rocks, checking under leaves, and using their black lights and other technology to find traces of human matter.
The worst part of the whole ordeal was the fact that the newspapers kept dragging Theo’s name into the stories about the girl. COLLEGE SOPHOMORE DISCOVERED TWO HUNDRED YARDS FROM SITE OF FAMOUS WINDHALL MURDER, one newspaper proudly declared. Similarities found between young, helpless women who died at the pinnacle of youth. Once again, Eleanor’s murder became a front-page headline. Parallels were drawn between how Eleanor’s body was found tangled in the rosebushes, murdered at a fabulous golden age party while her friends danced mere feet away from her body, unaware.
WILL THEO RETURN TO WINDHALL? queried another newspaper. Now in his nineties, the elusive Hollywood director hasn’t been seen in over ten years. Where is he now?
The last reported Theo sighting had been in New Mexico. A blurry photograph had surfaced a few hours after the claim: Theo exiting a laundromat, wearing a pair of sunglasses. He was half-turned in profile, and most of the people who still zealously tracked his sightings were convinced that it wasn’t him at all. Nevertheless, I’d clipped the photograph and added it to the wall in my office.
“Hailey,” Madeleine said softly, shaking my arm. “There’s someone up ahead.”
I peered into the darkness, but I couldn’t see anyone. High above the city, the path didn’t benefit from the light of streetlamps or passing cars, and the stars overhead were so faint that the trail was nearly pitch black.
“I don’t see anyone,” I whispered.
“Shh!”
We pressed against each other, shoulders touching, eyes trained in the same direction. I had been visiting abandoned sites for so long that I didn’t spook easily, but there was something eerie about the silence of the trail. It was rare to find silence in Los Angeles, a city with four million beating hearts, where the hum of electricity and tires and city noises drowned out most thought.
Madeleine and I stayed there for a good three minutes before I put my hand on her shoulder.
“It’s fine,” I said. “Let’s go on. It’s probably just an animal.”
“Yeah,” she said sarcastically. “With any luck, it’s a friendly little mountain lion.”
Madeleine w
as the only one who I had ever taken to see Windhall, because Windhall was special and I felt that only a few people should be able to see it up close. She was the closest thing I had to a best friend, and even though we were unlikely candidates for each other, we got along so well it was almost like we had grown up together. We’d met while I was doing research for an article on the Victorian homes in Boyle Heights and had stayed close when we figured out that we had a lot of other interests in common, most of which involved creepy Los Angeles legends. She had a lot of information to draw from, because she worked for a historical preservation society that purchased old houses and prevented them from getting torn down.
Madeleine was the only one who knew that I had dropped out of college halfway through my first year, then done a quick week in jail when one of my excursions went very, very wrong. The lead prosecutor called it arson. My lawyer called it a youthful mistake. It was a weird point in my life, one that I almost never talked about, since it was the same stretch of months that had seen my grandmother put a second mortgage on her beloved home in order to finance a good lawyer.
Madeleine was also the only person who knew why I had missed two years of junior high, which was the same reason why I was a grown man who still didn’t know how to swim. I could count on one hand the people who knew about my time in the hospital, aged eleven to nearly thirteen, helpless on a hospital bed while doctors tried to figure out what was wrong with my spine. I endured endless tests and false prognoses, then three or four surgeries that worked, but I wouldn’t ever really be a complete human being.
By the time I went to high school, I was half the size of other kids my age and smarter than most of my class put together. Thanks to my grandmother, I’d managed to keep on top of my schoolwork through one of those homeschool programs for child actors and other shut-ins who can’t make it to a regular classroom.
It was a good thing that I hadn’t met Madeleine until after college, because if we had gone to high school together, I probably wouldn’t have even registered on her radar. Madeleine had gone to school with the younger Geffens, Weinsteins, and Gettys. I had seen pictures of their weekend get-togethers: all dressed up in their raggedy thrift-store finds, unwashed hair piled on top of their heads like young bohemians, crouched on the balconies of million-dollar penthouses in Malibu and the Palisades. There was an artfulness to even the throwaway shots: painfully beautiful high school boys, long curly hair tumbling down around their shoulders. All of them with perfect skin and cigarettes balanced between their fingers, sleepy eyes and worn-in T-shirts on private planes. The message was clear, again and again: It’s ours, we’ve grown accustomed to it, we’re not afraid to lose it.
I had devoured Mad’s stacks of disposable camera photos with something akin to obsession, angry and envious of all these wealthy children who could be so blasé about the stained, secondhand clothing that they wore like some kind of private joke. I coveted their looks and the way they could make ripped T-shirts look glamorous, then hated myself for feeling that way. Second- and thirdhand clothing in my house wasn’t a joke; I had been lucky if I got something that came close to fitting.
I could pick Mad out in all the photos, a thin girl with an explosion of curls, sometimes down around her ears like an Italian model in the early ’80s, and an overlarge sweater or T-shirt. No matter where she was in the photograph, she always seemed to be the center of attention; while most of her friends looked complacent or wary in the photographs, Madeleine was always smiling. It was radiant, that smile, and I wanted to pluck young Mad out of the photos and carry her away to safety. Don’t hang out with these people, you won’t talk to any of them in ten years.
I might have envied her for the deep, cool private pools flanked by palm trees, elegant friends that gathered around the lip like off-duty swimsuit models, but there was a darker side to that life. There had been an eating disorder and then, in college, a dalliance with cocaine. She never called it an addiction, but her older sister had intervened and made her check into rehab. Neither of her parents got involved; I came to understand that was customary in wealthy Los Angeles families. Daddy had been off in the Swiss Alps at the time, mummy somewhere in London.
“With all the snow in LA, you would think people would stay for the winter,” Mad said about it all, wry as usual.
She hadn’t had contact with any of her old friends for years, but there were still elements of that lifestyle sprinkled around her house. I found Polaroids jammed into her kitchen drawers, holey T-shirts from an Italian regatta in the ’90s, which could have belonged to her father or else have been scooped up from a thrift store. You could never tell what was authentic and what was merely ironic.
* * *
By the time we reached the lookout and Windhall came into view, the hairs on the back of my neck were standing up. We hadn’t passed anyone on the trail, but I still felt like someone was watching us. If they were hiding in the bushes, then we were sitting ducks. For the first time, I questioned whether it had been a good idea to come out that night. If someone had killed the girl on the trail, and he hadn’t been caught yet, there was a chance that he was waiting for the chance to strike again.
The sight of Windhall calmed me a little bit. Even though most of Los Angeles thought of it as a creepy old murder site, it had become so familiar to me that I almost considered it a second home.
“Look,” Madeleine said, pointing toward Windhall. “Someone’s in the garden.”
“Where?”
“In the yard,” she said. “Can’t you see him? He’s standing by the swimming pool!”
As Madeleine spoke, the shadowy figure turned in our direction. It was too far for our quiet conversation to carry, of that I was almost certain. The lookout was on a cliff above Windhall, and there was a steep drop down the cliffside, at least sixty feet. The cliff tapered out into crumbled rocks and sedge, which collected in a drift at the back of Windhall. The back gate was fifteen feet high, edged with Victorian iron spikes.
We remained very still. As we watched, the figure stepped away from the pool and then meandered in the direction of the house. He disappeared beneath a warped fig tree, and we lost sight of him.
“Who do you think it is?” Madeleine asked. “It can’t be Theo, can it?”
“No way,” I said quietly. “Theo has a limp, remember?”
“Right. A friend, then?”
“Not a friend. Someone must have found a way to slip past the wall,” I said, and I felt angry. “It’s probably another vandal. We have to get inside.”
“What?”
“That person we saw,” I said. “What if he’s going to break in?”
“Have you thought this through?”
“You don’t have to come,” I said. “Stay back here and tell me if anyone comes.”
“How do you plan on getting down the side of the cliff?” she asked.
I shrugged. “I’ve done it before. It’s not so bad down the path. There’s a section where it’s just trees and brush. I know this trail pretty well, you know.”
Her eyes glittered in the darkness. “I’m coming with you,” she said.
“You sure?”
“Absolutely.”
I turned away from the lookout and headed down the path. The altitude dipped as the path wound down through the trees, and the chalky cliffs yielded to dirt clods and chaparral.
“Here,” I said. “We’ll have to go down here. We go any further, we’ll wind up in someone’s yard.”
Madeleine was quiet as we picked our way down the hillside. I wasn’t scared of heights, or spiders, or things that might be hiding in the darkness, so edging my way down a steep cliff wasn’t a big deal for me. Being in the hospital for so long had numbed my scare reflex, in a way, and that was probably the only positive side of it. The idea of climbing over the fence of Windhall and facing off against another interloper didn’t scare me, either; I was too fueled on the adrenaline of confronting someone. I had come to think of Windhall as my house, and I d
idn’t like the thought of someone else setting foot inside without my permission.
As we made our way toward Windhall, we passed above the yard of the next-door neighbor. The elaborate swimming pool was illuminated, and the yard was immaculate. Sandstone lined the patio, and I could see the flicker of a television through one of the windows.
“Do you know who used to live there?” I asked, pointing.
“No idea.”
“Otto Preminger,” I said. “It was a beautiful estate, but they tore it down.”
“You’re awfully sentimental for someone under thirty,” she said.
“Someone’s going to tear Windhall down, too,” I said. “They’ll replace it with a garish monstrosity, something with an aggressive security system and absolutely no personality.”
“Maybe you should buy it.”
“Sure, let me take out a third and fourth mortgage.”
We reached the back wall of Windhall.
“It’s just here,” I said, making my way over to the pile of rocks. “It’s a bit of a climb, but if you let me get up, I can try to help you over. You have to be careful about the spikes, but there’s a magnolia tree on the other side, and you can climb into that.”
“Hailey,” Mad said softly.
“If you’ve changed your mind, it’s okay,” I added.
“Hailey, shhh!”
I started to turn around, but before I could ask her what was wrong, someone clicked on a flashlight and shone it in my face. I was temporarily blinded by the beam and threw my hand up over my eyes.
“Who goes there?” called a male voice.
I eased myself in front of Madeleine. The voice was about fifteen feet away, standing at the base of the cliff. The beam was so bright that I couldn’t make out anything but dazzling rivulets that shot off the side of the light.